2023-05-14 23:21:59
On Sunday, October 9 of last year, the last day of the AMFest Barcelona festival was held. On stage, the post-rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor. In front of the Canadians, 1,600 people transposed by their instrumental arreones. In the most intimate passages of his recital, the silence was sepulchral. This is how Mondo Sonoro magazine described the end of the party: “The spectacular and terrifying finale with its mythical The Sad Mafioso… majestically closed this gigantic edition, honoring the meaning and beauty of underground in the most cathartic way that anyone could imagine or want. The feeling of accomplishment after all these days is practically complete. There is only one question left floating between a delay ethereal, one of those that have flooded so many concerts these days: how much more can you dig?
Spanish festivals, increasingly in the hands of fewer companies
Further
The organizers of this show of sometimes intense, sometimes extreme and sometimes dark music, from black metal to post-rock, have wondered something like this for years, whose groups seek to challenge the listener through the textures and volume of sound. How far could the festival grow while maintaining its essence? The AMFest is a niche festival that in its last editions brought together more than a thousand people per day, a project “totally altruistic and for the love of art” self-managed by an association of friends that in 2022 carried out a festival that cost almost 250,000 euros . Sergio Picón, the visible head and programmer of the show, explains that his objective was always “to see how far you could stretch the do it yourself”. “I remember Godspeed day and I still get goosebumps. It was an achievement to get all those people to understand what we are as a festival”. The feeling of success was absolute. It all made sense.
However, seven months after that unforgettable night, the festival has announced that there will be no AMFest in 2023. “We have tried to put together a poster for this year, but it has not been possible,” the statement clarified. As the main reason they cited “the uncontrolled rise of caches and expenses by agencies around the world.” As in the most dizzying composition of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, after a crescendo sustained and overwhelming ecstasy, came the abyss, the fall without a net and, finally, a crushing, desolating silence. The AM driving team has tried to make up to three different festival models. They have all run into the same wall: an unbridled inflation of caches even in a niche as specific and minority as theirs. What has changed in such a short time so that a festival that broke its artistic and audience ceiling for several years can no longer even be held?
three failed attempts
“The caches of the groups that acted in 2022 were those from before the pandemic, those from 2020,” Picón clarifies. Cult Of Luna, Deafheaven, Carpenter Brut, Lingua Ignota and Godspeed You! Black Emperor were some of the aces up the sleeve of the last and most massive edition of the AMFest. With artists of this caliber and a poster of up to 30 bands, the contracting budget did not exceed 90,000 euros. The first surprise came when they began to poll headliners for 2023. “AM is a much more open festival than it was ten years ago, but we can’t bring Harry Styles. If we want a headliner, the options for bands are not even ten. And when we tried to look for another group of Godspeed’s level, we saw that they were all asking for prohibitive caches: 40,000, 50,000 and one hundred thousand euros. We have never paid more than 15,000 euros for a group, but today any band of that level already asks you for double and triple ”, he reveals.
We have never paid more than 15,000 euros for a group, but today any band of that level already asks you for double and triple
Sergio Picon
— Director of AMFest
The solution was obvious: lower their ambitions and look for cheaper groups. “We planned to make a festival without headliners programming many more bands of the level of our festival, names that in a macrofestival would be from row four or five of the poster”, Picón specifies. And there came the second surprise: “Groups that in Spain would fill a room for 250 people are already asking for 13,000, 15,000 and 17,000 euros.” In many cases, these are bands that not only know the dimensions and the philosophy of the AMFest, but have performed in it a long time ago. An avant-garde metal group that played in the 2019 edition for 5,000 euros, now does not accept less than 20,000. Artists who performed four or five years ago are now asking for more than double and triple when their calling capacity has not grown even remotely in that proportion.
Given the panorama, when plan a and plan b do not work, you have to opt for plan c: lower your ambitions even further and design a festival by searching among the groups in the area below. “And that’s where the megahostia hit me,” Picón releases. “Barely known bands that have just released their first album and that if they came to play in a room in Spain they would bring thirty people, you offer them 2,500 euros and they ask you to raise it to 10,000”. Once again, runaway inflation. Even at the bottom of the table in a sector as niche as yours. “There we decided that in 2023 there would be no AMFest”, he explains. The only alternative, once cornered by the new market dynamics, was to flee forward and pay what was asked for those bands, but that option was never on the table. The reason is obvious: “We don’t want to pay 10,000 euros for a group that we know is worth 2,000”. This is how dozens of festivals work in Spain. “We do not want to be one more of those,” he settles.
Triggering the hiring budgets would have put the personal economy of the motor team at risk. “When your poster can’t attract as much public, you can palm 80,000 euros,” Picón calculates. A second, more ethical reason advised against joining this spiral: “Here is a network of people working altruistically to generate a powerful cultural bomb that makes the public understand that things can be done differently. If I don’t pay 40,000 euros to a group that deserves 20,000, I could use that extra 20,000 euros to pay that team,” he says. And there is still a third aspect to consider: the only way to recover an exaggerated investment is to raise subscription prices and join the inflationary gear of the sector. “Paying for those caches would have triggered our budget to levels that a festival that wants to keep tickets at decent prices cannot bear. And culture has to be accessible to everyone”, says Picón. “We make a festival in which those under 23 years of age have never paid a ticket. I do not want to put tickets at 50 euros per day. I find it super crazy that these prices are being accepted. But this war is lost. There the capitalist system has beaten us ”, he assumes.
A spreading plague
Picón exposes his case with the utmost clarity because he knows that it does not only affect him. “All European festivals of our ilk have the same problem. Niche festivals are the ones in danger. And not just those in our niche, but those in any other niche, ”he warns. International agents are skyrocketing the prices of their artists and not all promoters can afford them. Obvious: a festival for a thousand people does not have the same liquidity as one for 50,000 and although the macro-festivals would not have to be interested in artists from such specific niches, they want them more and more. “The new American hardcore is one of the most spectacular things happening. Bands like Scowl are regenerating that essence of sold-out rooms. And, suddenly, you see them performing at Coachella ”, he gives the example.
“The problem is that international agents should differentiate between macro-festivals and niche festivals. That they treat me the same as Primavera Sound, Mad Cool or BBK, doesn’t make sense”, sums up Picón. But when the most ambitious macro-festivals want both the superstars of the moment and emerging bands of all imaginable styles on their bill, agents offer groups that are beginning to stand out at those big festivals knowing that they can pay more money. Once in that big league, the cache of those niche groups will grow more because of the prestige that this means. And the upward spiral will leave more and more medium and small festivals out of the game. “Macrofestivals overpay, but it’s their business and they can do whatever they want,” acknowledges Picón, “but if the macrofestival on duty sticks its nose into a niche, which is what is happening to us, you can no longer compete,” he denounces.
growing slowly means dying
The AMFest was born in 2013 as a triple day of concerts in Barcelona venues such as Sidecar and Apolo. For 35 euros you could see a dozen bands, most of them from the state. A decade later, and after controlled growth, it held its largest edition with 65-euro season tickets that allowed 30 bands to be enjoyed (26 of them foreigners) spread over four days in a venue with three stages. Three stages, needless to say, where the music never played at the same time. “That never! You have to be able to see all the groups for which you have paid the entrance. It is a basic norm of my concept of festival”, insists Picón. “Also, we always leave 15 or 20 minute breaks between performances. It is not healthy to watch one concert after another without pause. You need a few minutes to talk about what happened, go outside, do a reset… Thinking about it now, I think it doesn’t make sense to set up three scenarios, ”he reflects.
“We have grown step by step, going head-on and making people feel the festival is theirs. And we have done it against it, at a time when we are exactly at the opposite extreme: people do not feel identified with cultural projects without personality and thought in macro terms. But my way of understanding culture is that: involve people, make the festival their own, ”he defends. However, the latest earthquakes in the market no longer affect only macro-festivals but also medium and small ones. The caches grow at a rate that endangers those proposals that cultivate their audience with patience. Patience is forbidden. Either you get on the train of progress or it runs over you. Or you jump in gear. No one is safe from the shock wave from the upper echelons of this business. Not even an extreme and experimental music festival that takes place in autumn can survive the turbo-capitalist dynamics of summer macro-festivals. The game board ends up being the same.
“That the macrofestivals devour each other seems great to me, but they should let us small and medium-sized ones exist,” Picón sighs. However, this possibility is increasingly remote in a market that tends to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. His suspicion is that other festivals on his profile will soon reach the same conclusion and perhaps the same impasse. “We have had the nose to jump ship. Others are already up to their necks in it. We will see how they come out of this ”, he points out.
There is no going back: the AMFest will not be held in 2023. In its place there will be a series of concerts in small halls: a return to the origins baptized as AMFest Encubierto. On Thursday the first of the concerts was announced and the first hundred subscriptions were sold out in less than an hour. Modest figures for a festival that grew as much as it could until the shock wave generated by the voracity of the sector ended up exploding in its face.
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